General instructions regarding the early review and response (rebuttal) process for CRYPTO 2013

This year authors will be given the opportunity to comment on the initial reviews written on their submissions. The main purpose of the rebuttal period is to help the program committee to improve the quality and accuracy of the reviewing and decision process, by having the author point out potential omissions and mistakes (both conceptual and technical) in the reviews. A secondary purpose is to give authors early feedback on their submission, thus allowing them more time to improve their work.

The rebuttal period will take place between Monday, April 1, 2013 and Thursday, April 4, 2013, 10:00 PM UTC. During that time, authors will have access to the current state of the reviews on their submission and have the opportunity to submit a response of up to 3000 characters. Once the response period starts, authors will also receive an email with the reviews.

Instructions for authors:

To access the reviews and enter your comments, please go to:

https://secure.iacr.org/websubrev/crypto2013/submit/rebuttal.php

You will be asked for a user name and password. The user name is your submission number, and the password is the password you received from the submission server upon submission of your paper. You will be able to enter and modify your responses throughout the response period.

When reading the early reviews and writing your rebuttal, please keep in mind that the response will best focus on factual errors, misconceptions, or omissions in the reviews, as well as answering any questions posed by the reviewers. In particular, new discoveries and results by the authors will be considered relevant only insofar as they help put the submission or reviews in context. No additional credit will be given to new results that are not reported in the submission.

Also, keep in mind that no decisions have been made yet. These are preliminary reviews submitted by the PC members, without any coordination between them. Thus, there may be inconsistencies. The reviews will be updated to take into account the author's responses and discussions of the program committee members. We may also find it necessary to solicit additional reviews.

Two final notes: First, you are not required to respond. If you feel the reviews are accurate and the reviewers have not asked any questions, then you should not respond. If you do, conciseness and clarity will be highly appreciated and most effective.

Also, please understand that the PC members are doing their best to understand your work in a very limited amount of time. This means that mistakes are bound to happen, and very rarely is any malice involved. So please try to be polite and constructive. Also, please keep in mind that your response will be seen by all PC members who do not have a conflict of interests with your submission.